Your initial
questioning of the reprisal raids against the terrorists who struck our
embassies in East Africa focused on the President's motives, wondering if this
were a purposeful distraction from his Lewinsky problem. I at least was happy
to see that he had consulted Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich prior to the raids,
but I was still horrified that we had bombed the Sudan, with whom we have
formal diplomatic relations. My hope is that you will press the Senate leaders
into full-scale hearings on our relationship with the Islamic world. Last
winter I wrote a memo to Jesse Helms, urging him to have formal hearings that
would invite leaders of the Islamic community in the United States to vent
their grievances and express their anxieties about how we are treating the 1.5
billion Muslims. I got a nice note from Jesse, but I'm afraid the Israeli
Lobby is simply opposed to any normalization of the Islamic world out of fear
that it will threaten Israeli security. I think this is wrong-headed thinking
that puts Jews at increased risk everywhere. You know, during the 1996
campaign, your friend Jack Kemp did everything he could trying to persuade the
Dole campaign to commit Dole as President to accept the petitions of any
government that wished to be on good terms with the United States. The jerks
who ran the campaign voted that down. Most of your Republican colleagues think
reconciliation is too wimpy and prefer to bomb anything that looks like a it
might contain an uppity Muslim. I send along the memo I wrote Helms last
November 3, "Please Don't Bomb Iraq."

November 3, 1997

Please
Don't Bomb Iraq

Memo To: Sen. Jesse Helms From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Saddam Hussein

Before you agree to drop the H-bomb on Baghdad
because Saddam is kicking ten Americans off the U.N. inspection team, please
consider that for six years our United States government has been trying to
destroy Saddam Hussein by a campaign that includes starvation of the people of
Iraq. No matter what Saddam has done to comply with the U.N, laundry list, the
list has lengthened. It is no secret that no matter what he does, he is not
going to be able to freely sell Iraqi oil on the world market. This is our
foreign policy, as Secretary Madeleine Albright has practically announced in
so many words. In a world with at least 40 years of proven oil reserves, it is
in the interests of the oil producing countries and the oil companies who try
to manage scarcity to keep Iraq and its oil bottled up. Saddam is a handy
excuse. When in the spring of 1996 the United Nations reported that as many as
500,000 Iraqi children had died of illnesses or malnutrition associated with
the embargo, our U.N. Ambassador Albright brushed off the report by saying
so be it. This is according to a report in Nation
magazine.

Now I am not writing this to take issue with our policy
toward Saddam and the Islamic world, although I disagree with it. I'm hoping
that you will at least not kid yourself and the American people into using the
current skirmish with Saddam as an excuse to spill more blood. First note that
he has not insisted that the inspection team be removed, only the
Americans on the inspection team. He is doing this with the sympathies of most
of the world, which most recently voted down our latest provocation against
Iraq — our attempt to persuade the United Nations to isolate the Iraqi
government by forbidding their foreign travel. Our two political parties have
expressed dismay that our wishes would be thwarted by the U.N. on this matter,
and have blamed the greed of those nations who wish to do business with Iraq
as they have in the past. We simply will not acknowledge that the countries of
the rest of the world can be motivated by anything other than commercial
greed, unless they agree with us on any injustice we commit in the name of
"democracy" and "human rights."

My earnest recommendation to you,
Jesse, is that you soon hold formal hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to take the testimony of American experts on the situation in Iraq.
I'd hope you would do so without trying to determine in advance of the
hearings how you would like them to end. With the end of the Thompson
committee hearings on campaign finance, which has wasted much of the year on
wild goose chases, you could claim the spotlight by examining our relations
with the Islamic world. These could be the most important hearings ever
conducted under your chairmanship. With the end of the important hearings ever
conducted under your chairmanship. With the end of the Cold War, the greatest
security threat to the United States is no longer the USSR and Communist
China, but an Islamic fundamentalism that feels totally isolated from the
primary power center of the planet. Because we are a Judeo-Christian nation,
our government has no trouble understanding the perspectives of Protestants,
Catholics, and Jews. Their global perspectives are well represented in the
executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government. The one
billion Muslims of the seven billion people on earth could be heard, as China
is today, if they were concentrated in one country and had one uniform
perspective. Its fragmentation into sects and branches has kept them divided
for centuries. When they were united in the Ottoman Empire, of course, they
were a match for Christian Europe and dominated parts of it.

The
controversy over the U.N. inspection team provides the perfect opportunity for
these hearings. I'm sure you understand that the kind of Islamic terrorism
that has become a threat to our security and that of Israel is the direct
result of a sense of political injustice in the Islamic world. There is no way
to deal with this feeling of injustice by starving the Iraqi population into
submission. Is there? There is no way to deal with it by forcing them into
corners where they are supposed to stay until death do us part. Is there? I'm
still troubled, as I'm sure you are when you think of it, that when Saddam
marched into Kuwait to begin the Gulf War and all that followed, he had asked
for and received the passive assent of our ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie.
Saddam is now viewed as a monster, but he was in good standing with us for
months and years before he got this assent from our government. We viewed his
conflict with the Kuwaiti emir as a border dispute — with Kuwait going so far
as to drill diagonally under the border to tap into Iraqi oil. And Senate
Minority Leader, Bob Dole traveled to Baghdad only months before the Kuwait
invasion to meet with Saddam and pronounce him a fine fellow.

At the
time of the invasion, I first opposed our involvement on the grounds that
Kuwait's neighbors seemed unconcerned, so why should we get excited? I was not
alone in my skepticism. Our former ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, also was
dubious. We both changed our minds after receiving a briefing from the Saudi
Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar, who said his government had changed its
mind about Saddam when persuaded that he was contemplating an invasion of
Saudi Arabia and probably had designs on all the Arab monarchies. When I
observed Egypt joining the coalition, I personally became a supporter of the
joint effort to expel Saddam from Kuwait, although I sided with Colin Powell
in arguing against marching to Baghdad. Why? I've never been convinced that
Saddam was a threat to the entire region as we seem to have persuaded the
Saudis with some aerial photographs taken by our naval intelligence. It never
made sense to me that Saddam would ask our permission to invade Kuwait over a
border dispute when his real intent was to knock off all the monarchs of
Arabia. On a list of the world's bad guys, he has to be up there, but on a
list of the world's stupid guys, he is well down. His maneuver on the U.N.
inspection team is a perfect example of him dividing the coalition and causing
us to spend considerable energies and cash to contemplate a diplomatic or
military solution.

Do you really know what's going on over there? Do
you trust the briefings you get? Do you trust the newspapers for your
information on what Saddam is up to? My belief is that you could make history
with a set of hearings, on this subject as on no other. You could ask Colin
Powell to testify on his expert advice, and you would have almost as many
people watching as watched the Ollie North hearings on Iran/Contra. You could
invite Louis Farrakhan to testify, on the grounds that as the most prominent
Muslim in America, he is in a position to give some unvarnished answers to
questions clouding our foreign policy. Farrakhan is the one American who is on
good speaking terms with every Islamic leader in the world, and one of the
keys to solving our security problems with Islamic terrorism — which he
condemns as a religious leader.

It does us no good as the world's only
superpower to plug our ears when people in other parts of the world say things
we prefer not to hear. As Farrakhan recently told me, When people feel the
outrage of injustice and have no institution to which they can turn for
adjudication, they often turn into beasts. We can attempt to cage the
entire Islamic world, but a billion is a big number and requires a big and
perpetually costly cage. Please consider this a serious proposal, Jesse. As
you are one of the few members of Congress who has never been afraid to tell
the truth as you see it, it may be God's will that made you chairman of
Foreign Relations for just this purpose.